Internet users have become increasingly desensitized to online advertising. These users often fast forward through video ads, ignore online banner ads and speed past interstitial pages. Years of exposure to various forms of online advertisements have left users adept at blocking out unwanted information while accesses information online or through other electronic media outlets.
Even as users decrease the attention given to online advertisements, many marketers are increasing their online advertisement budgets, collectively spending billions of dollars in an effort to capture the attention of online users. The increase in online advertising budgets reflects consumers' shift away from traditional media outlets, such as television, newspapers, and magazines, to the Internet and other electronic mediums.
With the significant rise of Internet usage over the last decade, online Publishers, e-commerce websites or their website hosts, collectively referred to as publishers, have become increasing concerned with online security, in particular unauthorized website access by Internet robots (i.e., non-human entities), or simply “bots.” A bot is a software application configured to run automated tasks over the Internet. A bot may be configured to artificially increase the traffic generated by a given website or perform other unwanted actions on a website.
To combat the problem of unauthorized website access by bots, publishers implement simple challenge and response tests, otherwise known as a Captcha, to confirm a request for access originates from a human user instead of a bot. To access additional content on a website implementing a Captcha, the user is required to view an image containing a portion of text and input the portion of text into a provided textbox. The portion of text within the Captcha is often blurred, skewed, or altered in some fashion to prohibit a bot from correctly identifying the text using standard optical scanning techniques. The text included in a Captcha is randomly selected and conveys no useful information to the user and provides no revenue to the publishers.
The process of completing a Captcha requires the user to commit a few seconds of attention on a specific image and respond to the image by physically entering text into a textbox. Unlike banner ads or online video ads where users are not forced to engage with the content, Captchas required a certain level of attention from a user to correctly identify and input the displayed text satisfactorily to overcome the challenge and enter the desired site. As a result, users may spend more time focused on the text within a Captcha than reading a paid-for banner ad displayed on the same webpage. Currently, from the perspective of an online advertiser, the time users spend focused on each Captcha represent a lost opportunity to reach potential customers.
As a result, there is a need in the art for a method and system to integrate an advertisement into a Captcha to create an interactive advertisement.